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Recent Developments in Drama in India | Essay

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Recent Developments in Drama in India!

When the British came to India, their theatre also came with them. Under the influence of Western education and theatrical traditions, English plays, especially those of Shakespeare, were translated or adapted into Indian languages. English and Italian dramatic troupes toured India and performed many English plays, mainly those of Shakespeare, in cities like Bombay (now, Mumbai) and Madras (now, Chennai).

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The Portuguese brought a form of dance drama to the West coast. A Russian music director Rebedoff, is said to have produced the first modern drama in Calcutta (now, Kolkata) towards the end of the 18th century. Thus, the Western impact awakened “the dormant,

critical impulse in the country to bring Indians face to face with new forms of life and literature, and to open the way for a fruitful cross-fertilisation of ideas and forms of expression”, in the words of Krishna Kriplani.

It was in Bengal and Maharashtra that the new theatre movement was initiated. In Bengal, a Russian Geratin Lebedev, with the help of his tutor Golaknath Dass, translated two English comedies into Bengali and staged them in 1795. These could be considered the first ‘modern’ Indian plays. But the real beginning was in 1831 when Prasanna Kumar Thakur established the Hindu Rangmanch at Calcutta and staged Wilson’s English translation of Bhavabhuti’s Sanskrit drama Uttar Ramacharitam.

Social drama of Girish Chanda Ghosh, historical dramas of D.L. Roy and artistic dramas of Rabindranath Tagore (Muktadhara, Chandalika) continued to be staged through the period of the worst-ever famines of Bengal and the Second World War. Gradually the new dramatic trend made it felt in different parts of the country.

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Dramas began to take up social themes, voice political unrest, and express resentment against alien rule, sometimes cleverly using myth and historical legends to do so. Furthermore, the narrative element of traditional theatre was reduced and psychological analysis of characters placed in different situations became prominent. The Bengali Neeldarpan by Dinabandhu Mitra written in 1860 took up the plight of the indigo plantation workers as its theme.

Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar wrote Kichaka Vadha in Marathi reflecting nationalist sentiments. Other plays took up social evils and strongly expressed reformist ideas. In this context, it would be worth noting the contributions of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) which became a part of the mass struggle of peasants, youth and workers. Personalities who developed into independent theatre workers on their own after the IPTA broke up include, among others, Habib Tanvir, Sheela Bhatia, Utpal Dutt, Shombhu Mitra and Balraj Sahni.

Parsi theatre occupies a prominent place in theatre development of the nineteenth century. Postagi Pharmji was the pioneer in establishing the Parsi Theatre Company in India. Professional Parsi drama companies staged plays in different languages—Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati and English.

The basic aim was entertainment, and diverse elements from diverse sources— folk theatre, music and dance, myth and historical romances— were freely assimilated and adapted to techniques of European theatre to create a theatre that was truly popular.

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There was melodrama, spectacle, glittering costume, fights and dances. Indeed, Aga Hashra Kashmiri, who wrote for the prolific Parsi theatre, came to be known as the Indian Shakespeare.

Many new theatre experiences were brought up on stage during the evolution of the Parsi theatre in India. The amateur theatre also developed with the works of Bharatendu Harishchandra, acclaimed as the father of Hindi drama.

Maharashtra also saw the development of a musical theatre under actor Balagandharva and later, the dramatist Khadilkar. The plot or story line would be feeble, being there only to bring in several songs set to folk or classical tunes.

There was a dignified charm about the theatre, but the surfeit of music began to pall, and soon a prose theatre grew in different regions of the country. Theatre groups like the Indian National Theatre and Prithvi Theatre came up. Literary personage like Bharatendu Harishchandra and Jaishankar Prasad in Hindi, Ishwar Chandra Nanda and Norah Richards in Punjabi, for example, made significant contributions to the development of regional theatre.

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Indian English Drama was started when Krishna Mohan Banerji wrote The Persecuted in 1837. But the real beginning of Indian English drama is traced to Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Is This Called Civilization which appeared on the literary horizon in 1871. Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo, the two famous thinker-poets of India, are seen as the first Indian dramatists in English.

Although the pre-Independence Indian English drama is notable for its poetic excellence, thematic variety, technical virtuosity, symbolic significance and its commitment to human and moral values, it was by and large not geared for actual stage production. The post-Independence Indian English drama, however, was benefitted by the increasing interest of the foreign countries in Indian English literature in general and Indian English drama in particular.

A good number of plays by Indian playwrights like Asif Currimbhoy, Pratap Sharma and Gurcharan Das were successfully staged in England and U.S.A. But no regular school of Indian English drama was established in India. This was mainly because of the encouragement drama received from several quarters immediately after India got freedom but it was monopolised by the theatre in the Indian regional languages while Indian English drama was ignored.

With the advent of cinema, the drama suffered a setback in popularity. However, it got a fresh impetus after independence. A conscious effort was made to search for the indigenous forms to create a ‘national theatre’. Traditional forms began to be experimented with, new techniques were evolved, and old and new began to be combined to create a fresh approach to theatre. Internationally, well-known writers were studied and their essence assimilated in a meaningful manner in Indian drama.

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Contemporary Indian drama, deviating from classical and European models, is experimental and innovative in terms of thematic and technical qualities. It has laid the foundation of a distinctive tradition in the history of world drama by reinvestigating history, legend, myth, religion and folk lore with context to contemporary socio­political issues. A cumulative theatrical tradition evolved by Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sirkar, Vijay Tendulkar and Girish Karnad, prepared the background for contemporary Indian English theatre.